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South Carolina Woman Jailed After Failing To Return Movie Rented Nine Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "Could you imagine being arrested for failing to return a movie you rented 9-years earlier? Well that's just what happened to one South Carolina woman. 'According to a Feb 13 arrest report, 27-year-old Kayla Finley rented Monster-in-Law in 2005 from now defunct video store Dalton video. The woman failed to return the video within the 72 hour rental limit, eventually leading up to her arrest 9 years later.'"
a movie you renter 9-years earlier?
I think that statement is worthy of jail time as well.
She will need to look up the laws in her state but here in Florida the statute of limitations is 5 years for a written contract. This should be easy to make go away.
I returned a tape, that old bowling movie KingPins to a local place through the drop box. But they mailed me ordering me to pay for it. Needless to say I didn't pay it. Imagine if someone got you arrested for failure to do inventory on their part.
:P
Also makes me wonder about those people who check out a library book and don't return it for like 50 years. What kind of late fees would they be looking at
God spoke to me
Arresting someone for theft under $10 ("Monster-In-Law" on DVD retails for about $5) seems to be a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. A more efficient punishment would be to seize wages/tax refunds/etc. in the amount of the theft + some additional punitive amount.
I sort of thought they get rid of most debt based arrests.
In theory, the US abolished debtors' prisons in the early 1830s(details vary by state, as usual).
In in practice, well, you can always spin a new set of legalisms to achieve the same effect, can you not?
How are we going to arrest people on frivolous charges when movies are streamed? I suppose we could make it a felony to fail to rewind a stream when you're done viewing it...
I once had to pay $50 for two redbox DVDs which I did properly return. Apparently their machine didn't register it or got disconnected from the internet. They also said they audited the box and did not find the videos. However, their audit was incorrect, because I returned it. I don't do business with redbox anymore.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
1) The victim is whoever absorbed the assets of the company at its closing. They've lost the value of the tape.
2) Being a licensed rental copy, the replacement cost is in the range of a hundred dollars or more.
The basic issue is that the law doesn't get to be ignored just because the media can spin the story to sound trivial. If someone robbed a store of $100 worth of merchandise, had an arrest warrant issued at the time, then spent nine years on the run, would it still be unreasonable for them to be arrested today? At the most basic level, the purpose of law is to provide a consistent accounting of what behavior society does or does not approve of. If a magistrate chose to neglect an old outstanding arrest warrant, then there'd be something very wrong.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If she lost a VHS tape 9 years ago, and the store went under since then, (1) there's no victim
Are you seriously not seeing the cause-effect relationship here?
This wasn't owing a debt, it was plain old theft.
Keep in mind that it's hard to return a movie to a defunct video chain.
See, chances are the charges about "stealing" the video will be dropped, because the Video Store company will probably not show up for a court date against her. But that didn't change that she had a bench warrant issued for her back when the store was still around.
What will happen is this: She will show up for the court date and the judge will dismiss the charges because of the age and that the video store is no longer around.
Had she bothered to take care of it back in the day, she would of gotten a fine and no jail time. But since she didn't, and they apparently don't have an age limit on those type of warrants, she got served the warrant when they found out she had one. And the warrants mean you get arrested and put in jail until you can go before a judge. So for her that was spending a night in jail for a video.
Be seeing you...
Yeah, in my state, they really screwed things up. A friend of mine got divorced about 10 years ago and his judgment from the judge says he is to pay X amount per month to his ex-wife for child support. So he does, every month. Then about 2 years ago, the state decides that all child support has to be funneled through a state agency. So, then he starts getting garnishments at work, payable to the state agency. Of course, since they are taking the money out of his paycheck, he can no longer afford to pay his ex-wife directly, which puts him in violation of the child custody agreement. But so far nobody is crying about that. His ex-wife is crying however, because she is used to getting paid by my friend on the first of the month. The amount is getting withdrawn from my friends check on the first, but doesn't get paid to his ex-wife until about 3 weeks later. So, in the mean time, he is spotting her money that he doesn't have to pay her.
Then, to make matters worse, the state decided that he owed about $15,000 in back child support, even though he has paid it every month faithfully. He is able to come up with cancelled checks for all but about 18 months. So they are forced to back down on the $15,000, but they insist that he pays the amount of those 18 months, even though he already has. Even his ex-wife says that he paid it, but the state doesn't believe them and insists that he pay them the 18 months.
So now, he has finally finished paying off the 18 months that he already paid, and one of his children is over 18 and no longer living with the ex-wife and no longer eligible for child support. The state agency does not allow you to pre-emptively file to get wage garnishments removed. You cannot do so until the day that the garnishment is no longer valid. However, once you file, there is a backlog (3 months and counting so far) before they process the removal of the garnishment. They continue to take money out of my friends check. They have, however, stopped making payments to his ex-wife since the child is no longer a minor and no longer in the household. They stopped that the day she turned 18 without anyone needing to file any paperwork.
Even crazier, the company we work for recently changed the company that does the payroll, so the state had to renew the now invalid garnishment with the new company in order to keep collecting the money that they are not entitled to and are not giving to the ex-wife.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Keep making excuses for jack-booted thuggery. You're part of the problem, not the solution. There should not have been a warrant issued to begin with!
Yup... The blockbuster in Amarillo at the time insisted that I did not return the items. They were rude and tried to bill me full price for two DVDs. It was only when I insisted that they watch some security tapes from the night in question that clearly showed me returning the items did they stop harassing me. That was when Netflix was first starting in 1997..It was a no brainer to switch from Blockbuster to Netflix right then and there and I am still with Netflix... And people wonder why Blockbuster went out of business.... :-0
--
Time is on my side
So you take something. The owner asks for it back. You refuse. You stole it.
The owner goes to a court to sue you to get it back, because the value is too low for a state prosecutor to care. You ignore the suit. The judge issues an arrest warrant at the request of the owner. The owner then politely sends you several certified letters impressing upon you your duty to resolve the issue. You ignore those letters, and in particular ignore an order of the court.
Later, you're arrested and forced to appear in court.
How is that thuggery? For one thing, the police aren't even involved, just the sheriff (an officer of the court). This is old school justice, where the person wronged has to do all the leg work in court to vidicate his rights. This is how things were done long before jack-booted police even existed.
So you excuse her theft then blame it on THE MAN keeping everyone under bootheels?
You aren't part of the problem, you are the entire problem.
Troll, troll, troll... punishment should be in proportion to the crime and filing arrest warrants over DVD or video-tape theft is bloody ridiculous. If she really lost the movie or whatever, the owners of the movie rental shop should have taken her to small claims court, gotten her sentenced to compensate them for the loss of the movie end of story.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
... And people wonder why Blockbuster went out of business.... :-0
Wow - you must watch a lot of movies!!!
Only big ligs use sigs.
Pickens County deputy Hashe claims that Finley was at the sheriff's office on another matter when the outstanding warrant was discovered.
So neither guns nor cars where involved here, she was already at the sheriff's office for a different, unrelated matter. Btw, that's probably why it took so long to execute that warrant (which actually was issued the same year that she failed to return the movie): the matter was too trivial to send a squad car with armed officers to her home, and police basically ignored it.
Video stores bought special copies, back when rental was still big, these copies were available earlier then retail release of the same movie. And they did cost more.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
> The police in Canada would not arrest you for an un-returned video no matter how long you had it because it is an obvious civil matter to be resolved by small claims court
IANAL but you can read about how that's not what happened.
> Yes, you have broken the law, and the owner of the video can take you to court, but you can't go to jail unless you fail to return the video after losing your small claims case, and then you would be going to jail for contempt, not theft.
There was no small claims case, because there was no appearance in a filed report of theft. Maybe it would have been thrown out for improper venue (meaning go to small claims), but more likely the fees associated with non-returning for 2 years passes the $500 (or whatever maximum for that area) that Small Claims can arbitrate. The warrant was likely for failure to appear and summary judgement of guilt. There isn't enough information here to say definitively, but deduction gives a couple possibilities. Warrants are issued to ensure other localities can arrest and hold regardless of charges (which may not even apply in the locality they are apprehended). That's part of the purpose of a warrant. It says "this person is wanted for a crime somewhere else, bring them back to us". Warrants sometimes describe what the crime was, but often do not because it can be complicated (failure to appear as a subpoena'd witness to testify about a civil case against a public defender being at a strip club instead of in court for a 3rd party contempt case, etc.)...Where the warrant applies is always present.
You seem amusingly critical for not recognizing the basic flow of events or even understanding the subtleties of the US justice system. Nobody spent tax money to chase her down, she ended up in a police station and was nabbed for a warrant. Nothing in the video cassette case seemed improper.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
This is bull. What's missing here is all sense of proportion. I'd love to have my former employers who owe me thousands of dollars in back pay thrown in jail. But it will never happen. Can bring a suit, and win it, but it doesn't matter, their companies are broke. Can't do anything more, like have a warrant issued. And there's this minor matter of the statue of limitations. Why wasn't this warrant voided after some appropriate time, like 7 years? Those former employers get off after only 4 years.
It cost us, the taxpayers, far more money than that video tape was worth to process this warrant. Justice is not served when actions taken in the name of justice cause far more damage and expense than they save and deter. Zero tolerance has its place, and this isn't it. That video rental company should never have had the power to sic the police on anyone, not for that. That they could have such power is all the more reason to pirate. And the police need to be reminded who their real bosses are: the public.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
This is the proper solution for this problem. One of the USA's greatest problems regarding law is that every single crime ends up being a felony these days. Being a felon carries some big penalties like not being able to own firearms or to vote. Now why would THE MAN want to do that hmm? Thanks for kicking that troll Savage! Friended :)